The thing that appeals to me most about Perl is its monomaniacal focus on getting the job done and getting out of the way, thereby catering to the user. By pure brute force it: (1) combines various Unix tools (sed, awk, C, ...); (2) is portable to pretty much any platform; and (3) allows users to program in whatever idiom is comfortable. Perlmonks' "use strict"/"use objects" dogmatic coding style is therefore disappointing, so while there is much to be gained from the site, I encourage people to program in whatever way feels comfortable.